To which they would have answered, if they were being brutally honest with themselves, "does that cost extra?" I have a nickel says they went with the cheapest urn available, spent exactly zero on a funeral service, but now want some money for pain and suffering. I know none of that of course, just an educated guess.

I was recently considering the idea of returning to school to get a degree in mortuary science (ie become an embalmer / mortician)

While I've certainly been to lots of funerals in my life, all of them have been, obviously, after the body has been prepared.

I was thinking about this from a job-security / interesting thing to do that is totally out of left field perspective.

On one hand, I really don't know how I would react to the nasty realities of the job (putrid body fluids, decay, mutilated parts, corpse reconstruction, etc etc) I might not even be an able candidate for that sort of work, I don't know...and on the other hand I don't think one starts at much more than 40K a year for that kind of thing.

You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together. And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shiat, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig."

I don't have a problem with this. What the hell difference does it make. Dead is dead. And I don't think calling the family up and saying "Your _______ is too fat to fit into my crematorium. Would you mind if I chopped him/her up into pieces to get the job done?"

I have family members who are nurses and I get to hear all these stories about family members of really fat people getting all upset because the nurses have to explain that they don't have an MRI machine large enough to accommodate them.

The end goal here is to reduce them to ashes. Who cares if they have to chop it up first? Trust me, when you reach 800 pounds you aren't concerned about your body. Add to that the fact that they're dead....they really don't mind.

mr intrepid:All kidding aside, oversize crematoria might represent a business opportunity. Remains could be brought there and a premium charged,

Not worth the ACLU lawsuits. Remember, we're all EQUAL!! Can't charge lardo extra for the same service without taking some flak.

eddiesocket:How does anyone even know it happened? Did the dumb funeral director tell the family afterwards?

Would you want to tell the family? WTF does it matter anyway?

Oven Master: "Uh... your precious family member will require some modification to property cook his ass."Family Member: "What? How dare you say such a thing in our time of loss!! I'm calling my lawyer!!"

I read an article once about the vultures. There was a place (India?) where it was very rural and the dead were almost always put out for "sky burial." Problem was, the local farmers had started using some pesticide that killed all the vultures. They didn't know what to do with their bodies anymore, because the vultures didn't come to eat them fast enough to keep it sanitary. They had to quit using the pesticide, which they had tons of, since it had been sold to them cheap after it was banned in most of the world.

Yay, chemical companies.

orclover:At my heaviest I think I weighed just at 400 pounds, and then I found much healthier ways to deal with depression (which is what it all comes down to, depression). Drugs and alcohol helped me tremendously. Thank god for drugs like weed and Xtacy. These days I stay around 250-275, which isnt as bad as it sounds considering my height. And I do it all without chemical help, nope, just kids. I mean I still feel like eating a .45 caliber sandwich daily but I don't because of my kids.

Good luck orlover. Same reason I never did it. I guess I'm glad I didn't. I also had a number of self-destructive habits over the years. Now I have few but I got old in the process. No cure for that one...well, except......fark it, pass the bong.

And at what point does a person stop caring that they're over, say, 400 pounds? Like, at 425, do they think, "Holy shiat, I weigh over twice as much as the average human, maybe I should cut back a little." But they just can't (supposedly). Or once you're past the 400-pound mark, it just doesn't matter anymore, you figure, fark it, I'll go for broke. It'll give my family something to talk about for the next 50 years.

Do the ultra-fat not care at all how this might affect other people? Forget about your family. They're not the ones who will have to carry your giant ass out of the house. They'll call the EMTs or the fire department to do that. Not to mention the poor hospital employees.

You have a deep dark depression pit. You cant fill it with sex for any number of obvious reasons. You cant jack off because of religious or psychological reasons. You cant take drugs because you are too afraid of your family or of being in prison. So you fill it with the last bit of endorphin gathering you have left.......the itus.....turkey coma.....just stuffing yourself until your body starts pumping out endorphins just to get you to stop. Eventually you weigh too much to move, it becomes hard to do anything other than lay there and move slightly so you can be cleaned or wave at a family member to shovel in more food. Thats the other thing they never mention, it takes a team to get somebody this fat. If you have to get up and wipe your own ass and heat your own food then you are burning calories, you wont ever make it past the 450 pound mark. To get to Lovecraftian horror levels of huge you have to have enablers, say daughters or parents who are willing to shove food at you and wipe down your cracks with wet sponges to keep you from dying of an infection.

The lowest flung farking crackwhore who's sucking dongs behind a dumpster for her daily fix can at least look at 500lb plus people and say to herself with pride, "hey. At least im not as bad as that shiat, im just hurtin myself, and my crack baby".

At my heaviest I think I weighed just at 400 pounds, and then I found much healthier ways to deal with depression (which is what it all comes down to, depression). Drugs and alcohol helped me tremendously. Thank god for drugs like weed and Xtacy. These days I stay around 250-275, which isnt as bad as it sounds considering my height. And I do it all without chemical help, nope, just kids. I mean I still feel like eating a .45 caliber sandwich daily but I don't because of my kids.

ArcadianRefugee:it was reported that he dismembered an 800-pound body in the Conyers location in order to fit it into the crematory

...so farking what?

"OMGZ you mutliated that body before mutilating it@!!"

o_O

Pretty much what I was thinking. Now if he did it in front of the family, ok, that's bad...

FTA: "According to CBS Atlanta, Ellenberg, who also is the owner of Metro Embalming and Crematory in Conyers, had his license suspended after it was reported that he dismembered an 800-pound body in the Conyers location in order to fit it into the crematory. Conyers police investigated and reported it is not a crime to do so. Permission needs to be sought from the family first, though, and it is reported that Ellenberg did not do so."

Yea, that'd be a comfortable conversation. Bubba's too fat to burn, you folks mind if I chop him up first? I don't blame the guy for not asking.

martid4:When my mother died I got a letter from the funeral home that cremation was permanent and irreversible. After I stopped laughing I called them up and told them I just couldn't decide and asked them if they could cut her in half and just cremate half of her. They didn't think it was funny and hung up on me.

DUDE! I just shot vitamin water all over the place. That's farking hilarious.

I am due for burial at sea, so nobody has any effort to expend on my behalf.

It would be far better combustion practice to build a chipper/incinerator that the current mass burn systems. Heck, you could probably end up with a positive energy sum if you had a heat recovery boiler after the secondary combustion chamber.

LeroyBourne:I've always wondered about the actual fat from a person. Can it be burned off to ash? I'm also thinking this oven is gonna need a bigger drip pan.

By itself, it'll melt and burn like cooking grease. Sooty, oily smoke.Crematoriums were created to combust at higher temps, which reduces a body and its fat to ash and crumbling bone "gravel" (it actually requires a grinder to make the familiar powder, the bone fragments are potentially disturbing).The fat itself, being largely composed of hydrocarbons, mostly reduces to CO2 upon complete combustion.

However, in the case of extreme obesity, the fat drips off at such a high rate it overflows the pan and spills out, creating the aforementioned gory crematorium grease fire. And I don't think you can fix that by turning it down, because that'll slow down the way the fat is combusted away, and may just make a sooty smolder that fails to reduce the fat effectively yet the body will continue to drip off more and more.

If it's my dead loved one, I don't want you to call me up and ask me if it's okay to cut the farker up before you crispy-fry his fat ass. That would be a hell of a lot more upsetting that finding out after the fact.

Just make sure he's all the way dead first, and give me the right ashes. Other than that, he's dead. Who cares?

El Brujo:I was recently considering the idea of returning to school to get a degree in mortuary science (ie become an embalmer / mortician)

While I've certainly been to lots of funerals in my life, all of them have been, obviously, after the body has been prepared.

I was thinking about this from a job-security / interesting thing to do that is totally out of left field perspective.

On one hand, I really don't know how I would react to the nasty realities of the job (putrid body fluids, decay, mutilated parts, corpse reconstruction, etc etc) I might not even be an able candidate for that sort of work, I don't know...and on the other hand I don't think one starts at much more than 40K a year for that kind of thing.

So, I've kinda put that idea on the back burner.

I think many of the unemployed have considered this career change at some point. I think you would eventually get used to dealing with the whole dead body prep thing, the hard part would be billing and strange requests from crazy relatives. I imagine there would be the whole picking up bodies from the hospital at 3 AM and heavy lifting too.

Why is this a problem? He's just going to burn the farking thing until it's reduced to ash anyway, so what difference does it make? What was he supposed to do with the goddamn land whale, and how is this any worse than the weird shiat they do to bodies to prepare them for funerals? There's nothing particularly sick about this.

I'll admit, I could stand to lose a few pounds. Maybe a few dozen pounds, if I really pushed it.

But let's get real: when you could stand to lose a few hundred pounds, there is absolutely nothing in life for you that won't be a custom build. There will be things that simply don't exist for you, because it makes no economic sense to build them.

Crematoriums, for example, are one of those things.

But you're one of a kind, to the relief of so many. You should go out in a one of a kind way. Let me just put this out there:

Darth Vader style funeral pyre.

For extra points, have someone project a younger, thinner Force Ghost in to the rising smoke plume.

Really, you need to pick your times wisely. I'm not saying I wouldn't have done the same thing, but I would have "stayed late" one night and while alone, disposed of the body. Nobody should know about the "kinda legal" things you do.

Hey Jim! Help me cut this body into 200 pound pieces. Then I need you to help me move the 20 pounds of coke from the Hearse to the truck of my car.

JohnBigBootay:MorePeasPlease: Nobody cared about the body when it was ramping up to 800 lbs. while it was alive...

Now it's not unreasonable to assume someone in that poor health did not have a lot of people who cared for him, but that's all it is is an assumption because there's simply nothing about it in the article. I have a grotesquely obese family member. He makes horrible decisions and pisses me off frequently but I do care for him.

and if his fat ass doesn't fit in the crematory what would you have them do to get him cremated? 800lbs; it should have been common knowledge among all parties that it wouldn't be a standard cremation.

That's.... err. Well that's pretty fat I have to say.I too would have been pretty despairing faced with a problem of that magnitude. Christ that must have been a messy job.

I think I would have just asked for permission, it's all about how you present it: "Your relative was an extraordinary person and we need to take extraordinary steps to help them move on with their journey. So can I bill you for the hire of a heavy duty fork lift and a couple of chain saws?"

MorePeasPlease:Nobody cared about the body when it was ramping up to 800 lbs. while it was alive...

Now it's not unreasonable to assume someone in that poor health did not have a lot of people who cared for him, but that's all it is is an assumption because there's simply nothing about it in the article. I have a grotesquely obese family member. He makes horrible decisions and pisses me off frequently but I do care for him.